Using an iPad for real, part 3 – Apps

• My trials and tribulations using an iPad for work… the basic setup of my iPad for real work.

Before I attempt to start ‘real work’ as an e-learning professional on my iPad (understanding how viable it is to use instead of a laptop) I figured I would run through the applications setup.

As I’m using multiple Apple computers and an iPhone I figured it would be easiest to stay within that eco-system (and using LibreOffice on iPad is a bit of a non-starter still). So, let’s setup the iPad Apps to integrate well with my iPhone, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Mini.

• Mail – this is no problem, and in fact many people apparently prefer the iPad Mail application to the desktop version.
• Office – I’ll stick with Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (although not as well featured as the desktop versions). I’m not a huge Google fan, although I’m sure using Google apps would be a workable equivalent for those who are.
• Apple Notes, Calendar, Contacts – all good 🙂
• Skype
• Facebook and Facebook Messenger (not sure how much these are productive or distractions/noise?)
• Twitter (see comments above)
• Linkedin
• WordPress – primarily for this site of course
• Moodle App – no surprises there! But will it be as good as just using a browser on a large iPad screen anyway?
• AWS (Amazon Web Services) – for accessing our Moodle sites
• Dropbox
• Finally, as well as Apple’s Safari browser I’ll be using Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome.

There’s a couple of other Apps too, but they are specific to my work – e.g. accounting and banking systems.

Right now I can see one main gap, and a couple of new possibilities. First, I need to find a really simple image editor – something that can just crop and resize images – which is all I need most of the time.

New things to investigate are now….

• Dictation – will this be easy, advantageous, and fast?
• Gestures – training myself in the most effective ways to swipe etc. on the iPad.
• Writing – can I use the Apple Pencil to hand write, and will that be better than using the onscreen keyboard, or the keyboard case?

More reflections on this experiment next month. But I have heard the upcoming iPadOS is going to help take the iPad to a new level of professional performance, so this might be very good timing 🙂

• About
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Stuart Mealor

Managing Director at HRDNZ

Stuart is interested in all things e-learning, with specific interests in Moodle, e-learning strategy, and business development.His experience in education over 30 years, MBA in International Business, and knowledge of e-learning systems implementation, together with graphic design background, give him a unique skill set for e-learning projects.

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